FAST CONSULTING - Key Persons
Alice Preston is a user experience specialist with extensive experience in large, small, and nonprofit companies. Alice is especially interested in how technology can provide good solutions for those with special needs, whether cultural and language differences, physical or mental access challenges, or access challenges stemming from equipment and bandwidth difficulties.
Until recently, Alice has been part of a project digitizing and presenting large amounts of research material about Africa, on a Web-based application suitable for low-bandwidth situations (see http://www.aluka.org).
Chris Koster is a researcher, workshop facilitator, and writer. He is currently managing editor of User Experience magazine.
Chris has over 25 years of experience as a user-experience professional, most of it at Bell Laboratories creating the software used to route phone calls, monitor networks, create directories, and otherwise make the voice, data and wireless network services work reliably and efficiently.
Dr. Bradford was the founding dean of the College of Information Technology at Georgia Southern University and, as of Fall 2008, a full professor of computer science. He teaches human factors and usability at both the graduate and undergraduate levels at Georgia Southern. He has written user requirements specifications for the Canadian Post Office and user interface design for Bell-Northern Research. See Jim Bradford - Mini Bio for details.
Mary R. Smith is a researcher, workshop facilitator, and writer.
Mary provides consumer interface analyses of ‘black box' products that are unsupported by documentation or staff. Mary has consulted on digital-rights management, teleconferencing, automatic speech recognition, interactive-voice-response systems, monitoring systems, inventory systems, and geographical information systems, among others.
Victor Stanwick was born, quite accidentally, into genteel poverty along the shores of the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, sometime in the middle of the last century. He was raised in an atmosphere of benevolent violence and readily adopted mayhem as a personal code of conduct. Victor attended school sporadically throughout the last half of the previous century and still cannot spell worth a dingo's kidneys. Victor acquired his extensive knowledge of graphics and design through innuendo and conversations in bars and has parlayed his talents into a successful business career by marrying wisely.
Victor helped start a small software company about ten years ago that was recently acquired by IBM (much to IBM's dismay). Victor currently sits in an office paid for by IBM and does little if anything to uphold the great traditions of hard work and diligence so vital to the corporate identity IBM has strived so long to achieve.